As Sara threw open the window, a dull, thudding sound came up to them from the direction of Oldhampton.  There was a sullen menace in the distance-dulled reverberation.

Molly gurgled with the nervous excitement of a first experience under fire.

“That’s a bomb!” she whispered breathlessly.

She, and Sara, and Jane Crab wedged themselves together in the open window and leaned far out, peering into the moonless dark.  As they watched, a search-light leapt into being, and a pencil of light moved flickeringly across the sky.  Then another and another—­sweeping hither and thither like the blind feelers of some hidden octopus seeking its prey.  There was something horribly uncanny in those long, straight shafts of light wavering uncertainly across the dense darkness of the night sky.

“Can you see the Zepp?” demanded Tim, with lively interest, from his bed.

“No, it’s pitch black—­too dark to see a thing,” replied Sara.

Exactly as she spoke, a brilliant light hung for a moment suspended in the dark arch of the sky, then shivered into a blaze of garish effulgence, girdling the countryside and illuminating every road and building, every field, and tree, and ditch, as brightly as though it were broad daylight.

“A star-shell!” gasped Molly.  “What a beastly thing!  Positively”—­giggling nervously—­“I believe they can see right inside this room!”

“’Tisn’t decent!” fulminated Jane indignantly, clutching with modest fingers at her scanty dressing-gown and straining it tightly across her chest whilst she backed hastily from the vicinity of the window.  “Lightin’ up sudden like that in the middle of the night!  I feel for all the world as though I hadn’t got a stitch on me!  Come away from the window, do, miss——­”

The light failed as suddenly as it had flared, and a warning crash, throbbing up against their ears, startled her into silence.

“That’s a trifle too near to be pleasant,” exclaimed Tim sharply.  “Go downstairs, you three!  Do you hear?”

Simultaneously, Selwyn shouted from below—­

“Come downstairs!  Come down at once!  Quick, Sara!  I’m coming up to carry Tim down—­and Minnie won’t stay alone.  Come on!”

Obedient to something urgent and imperative in the voices of both men—­something that breathed of danger—­the three women hastened from the room.  Jane’s candle flared and went out in the draught from the suddenly opened door, and in the smothering darkness they stumbled pell-mell down the stairs.

A dim light burning in the hall showed them Mrs. Selwyn cowering against her husband, her face hidden, sobbing hysterically, and in a moment Sara had taken Dick’s place, wrapping her strong arms about the shuddering woman.

“Go on!” she whispered to him.  “Go and get Tim down!”

He nodded, releasing himself with gentle force from his wife’s clinging fingers, which had closed upon his arm like a vise.